Midnight's Children (1981)

I am disappointed not to have been able to finish this, the first Booker Prize winner I haven't loved. I plugged along to about page 150 but was finding the reading experience so annoying and unpleasant that I had to give up.

Part of the problem, possibly a large part, is that I don't enjoy allegorical fiction where the plot and personalities pretty much serve only to support the allegory. Midnight's Children is not just an allegory, it is an intensely complicated one into the bargain. Six hundred and some pages of that is not something I'm prepared to endure. The lead character keeps saying that to know him you have to know the whole world, but, despite my recognising the quality of the writing and appreciating some of the humour and imagery, the world presented has not grabbed me.

I have changed to a David Malouf novel and am a much, much happier reader as a result. ( )

You can read my review of Midnight's Children over at my blog (contains some spoilers): http://www.rulethewaves.net/blog/?p=2098 ( )

I was not even halfway through when i gave up reading this novel.I got really fed up, annoyed and lost all my patience.This doesn't mean the novel was very bad it was because Salman Rusdie's way of writing was very high(????) that i had to read it twice to understand the characters and the story beneath it.I gave 5 stars for his unique way of writing because he has made it sure that the readers doesn't know what they were really reading.It was a surprise to me why this novel got Booker-prize award.The enthusiasm that was there before reading the book was totally spoiled after reading. ( )

Why nobody else but me should pay attention to my rating or review, and should just ignore everything I say:

I’m reviewing this and “finished” this book only because I do that for all my real world book club books. I cheated. If I had a did not finish or abandoned shelf, I’d have used it, and not poorly plowed my way through the book. I speed read the book and I’m not a champion speed reader, so I wasn’t being fair to the book and cannot do it justice when talking about it. I missed a lot, including some whats and hows and whys. I was not in the mood to read it. I think it’s possible if I hadn’t felt rushed to read it and had been in the mood for it, I might have appreciated it more. It’s likely I’ll never get back to it though, but writing these review notes are to remind me about it and to help me to decide whether to reread it sometime in the future. I don’t feel guilty about improperly skewing the book’s Goodreads’ stats because it has so many ratings and reviews. It’s not this book’s fault that I was overwhelmed and frazzled and had a pile of books I would have preferred to read. The book never drew me in; I just wanted it to be over.

The bad:

I stayed up late to finish it, not because I couldn’t put it down but because I wanted to put it down for good.

I have liked magical realism in some books but it’s never been a favorite sub-genre of mine. Here, for me it took away from the story. I’d have rather had a straight story novel, or even a non-fiction book about India’s history and independence.

I didn’t care about or get attached to the characters, and the narrator drove me crazy with his way of storytelling.

I printed out a character list to help me keep things straight, but found it wasn’t at all comprehensive and I looked at it only several times.

While some of the language was lovely, I didn’t like the way the story was told.

I love “twin” stories and switched at birth stories, but not this one, although for me, for a bit of time, the book got more interesting when the children finally got to age ten. When the narrator discovered them and they discovered each other, fairly interesting. But, the whole book was a slow crawl, filled with digressions, some of which I found superfluous.

This book, partly because of a narrator talking about times as though there when not during his lifetime, reminded me of some other books I’ve read with my book club, including Middlesex and Behind the Scenes at the Museum, and I think some others whose titles are now escaping me, but all books I enjoyed more, except for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, another rare one of our books I haven’t enjoyed, and the only other of our books I “skipped through” as rapidly as I could, and another one that had me amazed I didn’t love it.

The good:

This is the Booker winner of all the Booker Prize winners, and I have other winners on my shelf I really want to read.

It has many, many beautifully written passages.

My edition has an introduction to the 25th anniversary edition by the author, and he gives some background on what’s real, what’s fictionalized, how the book was received by people in the west vs. India, and by Indira Ghandi; all that was interesting information.

It’s brilliantly ambitious.

So, in summary: This book was not my cup of tea but I think it might have been me, me at the time I was reading it. ( )

Some books have no easy comp titles; this book reminded me of several other books (namely, Like Water for Chocolate, 100 Years of Solitude, and The God of Small Things, the last of which, incidentally, also won the Booker Prize, in 1997). Definitely elements of magical realism; not only a unique story, but a unique way of telling it as well. Quite a book. ( )